Cradle, a leading platform for AI-powered protein engineering, has raised $73 million in Series B funding to respond to rising demand for its technology in R&D-intensive industries. The round was led by IVP and included previous investors Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. This funding round brings Cradle’s total raised to date over $100 million.
Proteins are at the center of many products, from pharmaceuticals to food. Engineering these molecular machines has the power to reshape our world, enabling life-changing therapeutics, animal-free foods, eco-friendly pesticides, oil-free chemicals, and more. Creating new proteins is, therefore, key to unlocking smarter, more sustainable solutions to some of the toughest societal and planetary challenges, from fighting climate change to transforming healthcare and manufacturing.
However, traditional research methods for engineering better proteins have been slow, expensive, and unreliable. A successful R&D process can take years and millions of dollars, and many projects are never completed successfully because they cannot achieve their targets.
Cradle’s AI-based platform enables scientists to accelerate the discovery and development of improved proteins by making engineering better proteins significantly easier, faster, and more cost-effective.
Cradle has seen rapid growth and is now in commercial deployment across a wide range of industries. In the last year, it has significantly expanded its customer base and impact, signing new partnerships with Novo Nordisk and Ginkgo Bioworks and expanding its customer base to include pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, agriculture, and materials.
Cradle’s platform has been shown to accelerate R&D timelines considerably. For example, one biotechnology customer utilized Cradle to accelerate the activity of the P450 enzyme by 4x in just three experimental rounds, compared to the previous ten rounds. And Cradle’s AI delivered significant value by helping to unlock a project that had previously stalled and was on a trajectory to termination. Cradle’s platform discovered several impactful novel mutations paving the way for enhanced variants and future diversification strategies for this asset.
Cradle customers retain all IP rights for proteins engineered on Cradle’s platform and have strict security controls over their data. Cradle’s platform architecture automatically generates models tailored to a customer’s objectives, and the customer’s data is used solely for training their specific models, ensuring data security. Cradle’s platform is also adaptable across multiple assets and use cases for pharmaceutical and industrial applications, including enzymes, antibodies, peptides, vaccines, and therapeutic proteins.
The Series B funding round will partially expand Cradle’s wet lab to generate additional datasets that will be used to train Cradle’s models to address a growing array of challenges and modalities. Cradle will also expand its engineering team to further improve its ML capabilities to better generalise across tasks and handle more complex proteins.
Cradle recently appointed life sciences industry veteran Sam Partovi as Chief Commercial Officer, the company’s 40th hire, to help expand Cradle’s impact in the biotech sector. And Cradle continues to expand its AI research, sales and operations teams to help onboard more new customers, scale the business and get its software into the hands of every scientist.
KEY QUOTES:
“Cradle was founded on the belief that we could solve global planetary and human health challenges by using generative AI to rapidly accelerate the development of bio-based products. Over the past two years, our own research and our collaborations with partners have proven that this technology can deliver remarkable results across a range of applications, from developing new vaccines and sustainable chemicals, to novel diagnostics and agricultural crop protection. Our goal is now to put Cradle’s software into the hands of a million scientists and empower them to build great products. Our Series B will make this next phase of growth possible and we’re delighted to have the backing of IVP to help us scale.”
– Stef van Grieken, Cradle’s CEO and co-founder
“Biology is one of the domains where generative AI can have the biggest positive impact and Cradle is leading the way with its pioneering approach to protein design as a digital service. Given the costs associated with drug discovery or similar fields of research, any efficiencies at the R&D stage will translate to both major financial returns for customers and significant real-world benefits for humanity. With impressive results delivered by Cradle’s platform just two years after launch, we see a bright future ahead for one of Europe’s – and the world’s – most consequential AI companies.”
– Alex Lim, General Partner at IVP
